Book Reviews editorial

This issue features reviews of four books that explore issues of gender, militarism, and violence in contexts of armed conflict and post-war peacebuilding. These books present nuanced accounts of women’s experiences of combat, changing ideals of soldier masculinity, international responses to wartime sexual violence, and the everyday gendered politics of peace in the wake of war. In doing so, they reflect recent advances in feminist security studies, peace and conflict studies, and legal studies while drawing on careful, in-depth empirical work in Israel, Nepal, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Indonesia.

In Breaking the Binaries of Security Studies: A Gendered Analysis of Women in Combat, authors Ayelet Harel-Shalev and Shir Daphna-Tekoah challenge representations of the Israeli Defense Forces as an army of gender equality, where men and women serve alongside each other. By contrast, the authors present testimonies of women veterans that demonstrate that a clear binary between male and female combatants remains. The book unpacks the complexities of the position of women combatants – as perpetrators of state violence, but also as subjected to patriarchal violence within the military institution and subordinated by wider societal gender orders. In her review, Hannah West discusses the contribution of the book to debates in feminist scholarship through its foregrounding of women as active participants in war and its deconstruction of “the polarizing stereotypes of gender associated with security.”

The complexity of combatant identities is also highlighted in Heidi Riley’s Rethinking Masculinities: Ideology, Identity and Change in the People’s War in Nepal and Its Aftermath. This book explores the changing constructions of insurgent masculinities in the People’s Liberation Army during and in the aftermath of war and shows how a progressive gender ideology espoused by the Maoist movement encouraged the performance of an identity as a “new revolutionary man” and shaped the everyday practice of war. This, reviewer Hanna Ketola argues, represents a fresh take on the link between militarism and masculinity by decoupling the construction of masculinity from violence, examining the role of ideology, and tracing the nuances of change over time, from the insurgency through to post-war transformations. The book thereby provides important insights into when and how gender relations change in response to the upheavals of war.

Adding to a growing body of feminist literature that focuses on gendered forms of wartime violence, Sexual Violence Crimes and Gender Power Relations: Bringing Justice to Women in the Democratic Republic of Congo by Bilge Sahin examines the effectiveness of, and gaps in, international legal responses to wartime sexual violence. In her review of the book, Charlotte Carney emphasizes how Sahin convincingly traces the ways in which sexual violence crimes became the main priority of donor countries, international organizations, and international non-governmental organizations in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but simultaneously came to be understood in isolation from wider societal structures and power relations. Therefore, Carney argues, reading the book is essential to understanding how international assistance has affected Congolese women’s access to justice, but also why it has failed to challenge the gendered power relations embedded in the political and legal mechanisms in the country, which also underpin sexual violence during war and beyond.

Focusing on the gendered, everyday politics of the post-war period, Marjaana Jauhola’s Scraps of Hope in Banda Aceh: Gendered Urban Politics in the Aceh Peace Process unsettles the much-repeated narrative that the Indonesian province of Aceh is a successful case of peacebuilding after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and the signing of a peace agreement, the Helsinki Memorandum of Understanding, in 2006. In her review of the book, Veronica Strandh describes how Jauhola’s ethnographic accounts of the everyday lives of single mothers, punk scene youth, and workers in the plastic water bottle industry complicate that narrative and bring into view the politics and power dynamics involved in the construction of (a particular kind of) peace. Discussing the contributions of the book, Strandh also emphasizes its methodological originality, such as its use of visual storytelling through appended life history videos, and its elaboration of methodological approaches such as “stumbling scholarship.”

In the Book Reviews section, we focus on books that explore feminist politics and gender relations in a global frame. We aim to include multi-disciplinary, cross-border, and critical feminist scholarship. The section includes three types of contributions: book reviews, review essays, and essays that rethink the canon of feminist scholarship. Book reviews engage with an individual, recently published piece of work, briefly describing its content and critically evaluating and locating its contributions to global feminist scholarship and to particular bodies of literature. Review essays discuss several texts on the same theme and bring them into conversation with each other, aiming either to explore a recent debate or emerging research field that has generated a range of new publications, or to survey the best of the literature covering a more established area of research. Essays that rethink the canon aim to re-evaluate the canon of feminist global political scholarship and its boundaries, and provide the opportunity to also engage with books that are not recently published. These essays may aim to critically rethink the established literature on a particular topic in light of recent events or new publications, or to engage with books that have been marginalized by existing disciplinary boundaries and explain why these ought to be essential reading for feminists working on global issues.

If you are interested in submitting a review essay or a review, please contact the Book Reviews Editors, Elisabeth Olivius, Ebru Demir, and Katrina Lee-Koo. Reviews and essays need to be written in English, but the texts they review do not.

For further information, please refer to the journal’s FAQ page at https://www.ifjpglobal.org/submit-to-us/#anchor_book_reviews_shortcut.